Morning Meeting by Bert? Improv! – D56

This morning Bert was going to facilitate the meeting, but since he has been sick (rumor says that he has pneumonia) we facilitated as a group. First we watched some videos and wait for the other because we were only 8, and then only three more arrived later and we discussed a quote Bert gave us. We changed the method of the attendance sheet, so now everyone is responsible for putting his or her name on the respective column and that way we will know who's absent.

These are the videos we watched for today's morning meeting:

TED2012 remixed, 60 Second Adventures in Economics (combined), The History of Nikola Tesla, The History of Thomas Edison, and The History of Che Guevara.

We also discussed this quote, first in pairs and then as a group.

“…(As a public school teacher) I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meaning of our lives…We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know any other way.”

- John Taylor Gatto

On Time... And New Method

The Crime of the Zebra

“Hello World!” and Debriefing – D49

In today’s programming class, we finished our web app on Heroku! It’s very simple and only says “Hello World!”, but it’s a start in order to build more interesting apps like Euclid’s Sorting Hat.

Today’s debriefing was a little different than it’s used to, because Bert showed us a video called, Stuck on an Escalator, about how people think they are stuck in something when they are really not stuck at all. The other thing Bert shared with us was a couple of quotes regarding education and personal commitment. The main reason Bert shared these with us was to reflect on how we are feeling at the MPC, and how that is a natural thing to feel that we can overcome if we work together.

This is the quote he showed to us:
"Socrates was one of the first to recognize the intimate and necessary relationship between education and personal commitment. His pedagogy was skillfully shaped to penetrate the protective armor of custom and opinion to release in the suddenly exposed and vulnerable individual a sense of shocked engagement. The aim of the elenchus—the name given to his teaching method—was to give birth to a desire for authentic learning. Intellectually, the elenchus, as it worked on the student, moved from strongly held opinion, to floundering uncertainty, to loss, to not-knowing, that engendered the authentic quest for meaning, the desire for finding out. Emotionally, the elenchus began with smug ease (‘I know what I think’) that dissolved into unease, then into anguish, then into concern and, finally, into collaborative and reflective curiosity." (Peter Abbs, The Educational Imperative: Socratic and Aesthetic Learning, p. 17)